Copasetic Flow

Once again the Eagleworks warp drive is in the news again.  This time purporting to be the subject of a peer reviewed article. Errr, uhhh, where to start. First, these guys have done pretty poor science for a pretty long time. Which is sad, because if it was real, they would have some really cool stuff. Second, the AIAA reference clears up a lot of confusion I had about this announcement. The AIAA hosts an 'advanced propulsion' workshop once a year. By advanced, think... well... scifi. It's not to say that legit researchers don't turn up there, because they do, it's just to say that they're not all legit. The proceedings of this conference are in fact published. Consequently, getting peer-reviewed, and published in this particular conference doesn't infer you're entirely legit. This leaves us with why I don't think their science is entirely legit. I'll ignore all the 'violations of Newton's 2nd law' arguments, since those have b...

While doing some research on science journalist of the '50s, Michael Gladych, I come across other interesting science journalists as well.  One of them is Ansel Talbert of the New York Herald Tribune.  Looking into Mr. Talbert's travel in the '50s, I found that he'd taken a flight from Denmark to Alaska.  At first, the only remarkable thing about the flight was that HRH Prince Axel of Denmark and Iceland was on board, (if you're from the Sates like me, I bet you didn't know there was a prince of Denmark and Iceland!) A little investigation made even this fact seem trite when Prince Axel was revealed as the CEO of SAS airlines, the carrier for the flight in question.  Not all was lost though... Far from it! It turns out the flight was the first commercial flight to take advantage of the U.S. Air Force's newly released polar maps!  For the first time ever, a group of passengers flew from Denmark to Tokyo, stopping only in Alaska, in just 8,000 mile...

D.r Harold Daw In the late 1950’s, my uncle, then a teenager, found himself at odds with the Law in Las Cruces, NM.  Simply put, the police had decided he was, in fact, his brother, wanted for fleeing a drag race in the same car my uncle had just driven home.  Despite his repeated pleas that they were arresting the wrong Carter boy, the police persevered, first handcuffing my uncle, and then shuffling him into the police car.  Unbeknownst to them, the woman who lived across the street from my dad’s family had observed everything.  Turning to her husband, she said Harold, they go the wrong boy!  You go down to the station and help them straighten this out!”  That’s how my uncle found himself riding back to his house in the car of Dr. Harold Daw, head of the New Mexico State University physics department.  The Hot Rod in Question The reason I bring this story up now, isn’t because of its somewhat topical nature in relation to the state of ...

Today’s math fun involves portions of yesterday's, but with a few more steps.  It may also—dare I say it?—involve partitioning!  I might be using the word partitioning in an incorrect way, and if so, then pardons please, (also, please let me know).  The question is, what are the fewest number of coins you need to make change for up to a dollar. Here's how I worked, using an iterative algorithm, (fancy words for: "I'm going to use the same trick over and over").  It was all about granularity of coins, and getting quickly from one amount to the next.  The quickest way, (where quick is defined by using the smallest number of coins), to get to a large amount of change is with large coins.  So, as we move around within 99 cents, the biggest step we can make is with a half dollar. Using yesterday’s method, we can fit one half dollar into 99 cents.  That leaves us with 49 cents left move around in.  The quickest way to make progress within that interva...

Working through the problems in Niven's book on combinatorics, I came across the following one that cleverly introduces least-common-multiples without saying any of those words.  The book asks the following question: How many numbers that are evenly divisible by 11 exist between 1 and 2000?  How many that aren't also evenly divisible by 3?  How many numbers that are evenly divisible by 6, but not by 4 exist between 1 and 2000? The hastily scribbled answer can be seen below, with each of the answers boxed in succession down the screen. By simply dividing 2000 by 11, we find out how many integers between 1 and 2000 are evenly divisible by 11.  In other words, we ask how many multiples of 11 can fit between 1 and 2000.  When we want to eliminate the multiples of 3, that's when the least common multiple comes in.  We already have the answer for all numbers divisible by 11, but how to eliminate those also divisible by 3?  By first asking what number...

Yesterday was gorgeous here in San Francisco!

So, this is cool!  As I've mentioned here before [1], the painting shown below depicts the namesake of Agnew Hunter Bahnson Jr., (author of The Stars are Too High).  I've also mentioned that Agnew's cousin, Dr. Henry T. Bahnson, is named after their shared grandfather that Dr. Agnew, depicted in the painting below, operated on.  I've even mentioned that Dr. Bahnson worked with Dr. Blalock who originated the life-saving blue-baby surgical technique along with Dr. Vivien Thomas.  Now, here's the cool new stuff!  A movie, "Stomething the Lord Made", that treated the relationship between Dr. Blalock, and his surgical assistant Dr. Thomas was produced by HBO.  In the scene immediately before the portrayal of Dr's Blalock, and Tomas' groundbreaking surgical technique, the aforementioned, painting appears in the background.  As I said, you already knew that Bahnson worked with Blalock, but did you also know that Bahnson traveled with Dr. Blalock as hi...